Using Bookkeeping Tools to Manage Daily Finances

After you set up your business’s books and put in place your internal controls, you’re ready to use the bookkeeping systems you established to manage the day-to-day operations of your business. You’ll quickly see how a well-designed bookkeeping system can make your job of managing your business’s finances much easier.

If you take advantage of your bookkeeping information and review and consult it throughout the year, you should have a good idea of how well your business is doing. Remember to take any needed course corrections to ensure that your end-of-the-year reports look great.

Maintaining inventory

If your company keeps inventory on hand or in warehouses, tracking the costs of the products you plan to sell is critical for managing your profit potential. If you see inventory costs trending upward, you may need to adjust your own prices in order to maintain your profit margin. You certainly don’t want to wait until the end of the year to find out how much your inventory cost you.

You also must keep careful watch on how much inventory you have on hand and how much was sold. Inventory can get damaged, discarded, or stolen, meaning that your physical inventory counts may differ from the counts you have in your books. Do a physical count periodically — at least monthly for most businesses and possibly daily for active retail stores.

In addition to watching for signs of theft or poor handling of inventory, make sure you have enough inventory on hand to satisfy your customers’ needs.

Tracking sales

Everyone wants to know how well their sales are doing. If you keep your books up-to-date and accurate, you can get those numbers very easily on a daily basis. You can also watch sales trends as often as you think necessary, whether that’s daily, weekly, or monthly.

Use the information collected by your bookkeeping system to monitor sales, review discounts offered to customers, and track the return of products. All three elements are critical to gauging the success of the sales of your products.

If you find you need to offer discounts more frequently in order to encourage sales, you may need to review your pricing, and you definitely need to research market conditions to determine the cause of this sales weakness. The cause may be new activities by an aggressive competitor or simply a slow market period. Either way, you need to understand the weakness and figure out how to maintain your profit goals in spite of any obstacles.

When sales tracking reveals an increase in the number of your products being returned, you need to research the issue and find the reason for the increase. Perhaps the quality of the product you’re selling is declining, and you need to find a new supplier. Whatever the reason, an increased number of product returns is usually a sign of a problem that needs to be researched and corrected.

Handling payroll

Payroll can be a huge nightmare for many companies. Payroll requires you to comply with a lot of government regulations and fill out a lot of government paperwork. You also have to worry about collecting payroll taxes and paying employer taxes. And if you pay employee benefits, you have yet another layer of record keeping to deal with.

Preparing financial reports

Most businesses prepare at least two key financial reports, the balance sheet and the income statement, which it can show to company outsiders, including the financial institutions from which the company borrows money and the company’s investors.

The balance sheet is a snapshot of your business’s financial health as of a particular date. The balance sheet should show that your company’s assets are equal to the value of your liabilities and your equity. It’s called a balance sheet because it’s based on a balanced formula:

Assets = Liabilities + Equity

The income statement summarizes your company’s financial transactions for a particular time period, such as a month, quarter, or year. This statement starts with your revenues, subtracts the costs of goods sold, and then subtracts any expenses incurred in operating the business. The bottom line of the income statement shows how much profit your company made during the accounting period. If you haven’t done well, the income statement shows how much you’ve lost.

Paying taxes

Most small businesses don’t have to pay taxes. Instead, their profits are reported on the personal tax returns of the company owners, whether that’s one person (a sole proprietorship) or two or more people (a partnership). Only companies that have incorporated, become a separate legal entity in which investors buy stock, must file and pay taxes.

Partnerships and LLCs do not pay taxes unless they filed a special form to be taxed as a corporation, but they do have to file information returns, which detail how much the company made and how much profit each owner earned, plus any costs and expenses incurred.